GoodSync Enterprise and Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

In the modern world where information is the backbone of every business process, the ability of an organization to rebuild its information system is crucial to its survival in case of a disaster. Business continuity planning (BCP) is the creation of a logistical plan (called a business continuity plan) that describes how an organization can recover its interrupted functions after a disruption. Essentially, BCP details how your organization would stay in business in the event of a simple hard drive failure or corruption or something more devastating such as physical destruction or natural disaster (flood, earthquake, etc.).

The restoration of corporate IT capabilities includes, among other things, rebuilding servers and user workstations. On the software side, this process involves installation and configuration of operating systems and applications and loading of user data. Normally, the majority of user workstations within a corporation have the same or similar configuration; therefore, rebuilding a blank user environment does not pose a problem anymore. The real problem is how to load the data of individual users to their new workstations.

GoodSync Enterprise provides a helpful enabler for BCP that is cost-effective and can be managed in a simplified way. Using GoodSync Enterprise, your organization can automatically backup employee folders and files to a central location and, if needed, propagate these changes across multiple backup locations that may be accessible via LAN, WAN or only via FTP/SFTP or theWeb (WebDAV).

Using a rich, command-line interface, GoodSync Enterprise gives the the system administrator full control to run a periodic backup of user folders and files to a central location from Active Directory. Additionally, the system administrator can set up multiple, geographically distant backup locations for GoodSync Enterprise to propagate all changes automatically between these locations, ensuring the data is current and fully intact in multiple locations.

At the core of GoodSync Enterprise's ability to effectively backup and propagate user data to multiple locations is the fact that GoodSync Enterprise backs up files, not entire disks. Unlike more complex disk backup and related software, GoodSync Enterprise does not require backup space to be an order of magnitude larger than actual user data since it does not create copies of system files, system data, or even empty disk space. Neither does it create multiple copies of the same files if it detects such files did not change over time.

With the capability of data storage hardware going up and the price of storage per unit going down, it is possible now under certain conditions to store a copy of user files on a SAN (storage area network), a hard drive array, or even a single hard drive.

GoodSync Enterprise does not require a large storage capacity and can therefore be used to perform 'live' or 'hot' backups, storing all backup files on servers that are accessible immediately if a recovery is needed. GoodSync Enterprise allows your organization to save extremely expensive backup systems that store user data on tapes or platters and to eliminate the additional data copying to/from a backup media as well as the associated backup management steps.

The following list summarizes the important benefits of using GoodSync Enterprise vs. a disk backup solution:

• Automatically propagates user data to multiple backup locations.
• Eliminates the need to back up user files on tapes or platters thus providing immediate savings through eliminating several costly and time-consuming steps;
• Minimizes network traffic and disc activity by only copying new files and new versions of existing files to the backup location.
• By using a "live" backup, allows instant access to the backed up data as it does not require a timely and expensive process of data restoration from classic backup media such as tapes or platters.
• Drastically reduces the amount of space needed to store user data files.
• Eliminates the need for the offline backup storage, simplifying a number of compliance and legal processes.
• Makes a number of corporate processes considerably simpler since all user files are stored in a readily-accessible system. Such processes include corporate policy monitoring and enforcement, legislation and regulation compliance (HIPAA, SOX, etc.), electronic discovery and production of electronically stored information (ESI) documents, internal and external investigations (e.g., SEC), etc.
• Allows a "propagate deletion" option, which clears unnecessary files (if configured) from storage, thus providing a way to keepbackup to a more efficient, manageable size.